You have all the characteristics of a popular politician: a horrible voice, bad breeding, and a vulgar manner.

Natural rights is simple nonsense: natural and imprescriptible rights, rhetorical nonsense—nonsense upon stilts.

I am invariably of the politics of the people at whose table I sit, or beneath whose roof I sleep.

Whether for good or evil, it is sadly inevitable that all political leadership requires the artifices of theatrical illusion. In the politics of a democracy, the shortest distance between two points is often a crooked line.

A government which robs Peter to pay Paul can always count on the support of Paul.

Every communist must grasp the truth: “Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.”

Politics, n. A strife of interests masquerading as a contest of principles. The conduct of public affairs for private advantage.

What, to the American slave, is your Fourth of July? I answer: a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him your celebration is a sham.

Treaties, you see, are like girls and roses: they last while they last.

It is impossible to tell which of the two dispositions we find in men is more harmful in a republic, that which seeks to maintain an established position or that which has none but seeks to acquire it.

The Revolution is made by man, but man must forge his revolutionary spirit from day to day.

The most hateful torment for men is to have knowledge of everything but power over nothing.

Every country has the government it deserves.